TWO HOURS LATER

Captain Lofgren was holding the set of headphones to his ears as he listened inside of the BQQ-5E sonar suite.

“I still don’t hear a thing,” he said to his sonar team.

“It’s there, Captain, five miles outside of the target area. Just as we were approaching station it passed right beneath us,” Petty Officer John Cleary said as he adjusted the volume control to the captain’s headset.

“Tell me again what in the hell it’s supposed to be I’m listening for?”

The young petty officer seemed lost for words again as he looked from his captain to the first officer standing just inside the curtain of the sonar station.

“It’s like … like … a pressure wave of some kind, and it’s moving extremely fast. The only thing that can cause something like that is a large object moving through the sea. We hear the same thing with whales, only on a smaller scale.”

“I just don’t hear it.”

“How fast did you say it was moving again?” the first officer asked.

This time the operator looked at his training partner, who had also failed to hear the strange noise. He swallowed, then looked at the two officers.

“About seventy-six knots. I measured the speed of the pressure wave against our static location.”

Lofgren removed the headphones and looked at the operator, but Cleary kept his eyes straight ahead, not flinching away from his captain’s questioning look.

“Captain, it went to almost eighty knots speed after I detected it, and at the moment it passed beneath us I felt the boat …” He stopped, knowing the explanation would sound too amazing to believe.

“Felt the boat what?”

“I have the computer and depth track on paper to back me on this, Captain.”

Lofgren didn’t say anything as he waited.

“Columbia actually rose in depth by eight feet as water under our keel was displaced by whatever it was that plowed beneath us when we came into the affected area.” The sonar man pulled a graph and showed it to the two officers. “One minute we’re at three hundred and three feet of depth, the next we went to two hundred and ninety-five—a difference of eight feet. Something monstrous passed beneath our keel at that exact time. What could move a Los Angeles class boat by that much depth from that far away?”

The first officer raised his eyebrows and looked at Lofgren.

“I guess it would have had to have been big to shove aside that much water. Are you sure the object was that deep?”

Again, the young man was hesitant to answer. “Captain, it was so deep that …” He saw the impatience showing on both officers’ faces. “About fifteen hundred feet at first contact.”

“Fifteen hundred feet of depth and then it suddenly sprang like a cheetah up to seventy-five knots? I can’t buy that, Cleary. Not even the Russians have anything remotely close to half that,” the first officer said.

“Write it up, Cleary, and get it to me. We’ll bait the hook and send it out and see if anyone at COMSUBLANT bites.”

As Captain Lofgren returned to the conn, he half-turned to his first officer.

“Before you say anything, Dick, we know the attack on the surface happened, and we know Columbia didn’t do it. Therefore, someone else had to have done it. In addition, that someone did it in clear listening range of not only us, but also that Chinese sub they handled with ease. I’ll bet my command that the attacker and Cleary’s strange contact are one and the same.”

The captain turned and saw the eyes of his crew looking at him. The unknowns being pondered frightened them, and he could see it.

Every man aboard knew they had something in the water that could outrun and outgun them, and nothing made an American submariner more concerned than an unseen and unknown enemy.